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of disrupting dominant history, giving the lie to ideologies of progress and
history used as justification for the present order. He combined a theological
concept of revelation with a Marxist understanding of revolution, suggesting
that an attention to the traces of the past in the everyday could pierce the
dreamlike state induced by capitalism and help to produce a kind of ‘awaken-
ing’ necessary for revolutionary change.
Nora’s historical project, on the other hand, has been read as a contribution
to the neo-liberal reaffirmation of French national identity (Anderson 2004).
In the 1990s he compiled a massive collection of historical writings which share
an interest in lieux de mémoire – French history as the study of those events,
sites and rituals that have come to symbolize the collective national past and
have gained mythic or nostalgic associations. In his view, authentic collective
memory is now lost, and lieux de mémoire have taken its place. Nora argues
that by the end of the nineteenth century, archival memory and history sup-
plant true memory, which becomes individualized and privatized as a psycho-
logical matter (1996: 11). Lieux de mémoire mediate between private memory
and public history, acting as sites of collective memory.
The decline of ‘true’ social memory produces a collective sense of loss and
uprootedness leading to a longing for the past, a desire ‘for the feel of mud on
our boots’ (Nora 1996: 12). Separation from the past turns everything into a
‘trace’, something that could potentially become historical evidence. It also, in
Nora’s view, lays the ground for the artificial and creative reconstruction of the
past, for only when the past seems dead to us can it be brought to life through
reconstruction and simulation (1996: 13–4). The job of the historian, it seems
to Nora, is to ‘substitute for imagination’, to attend to those vestigial sites
where ‘our depleted fund of collective memory is rooted’ and bring the past to
life (Nora 1996: 6, 20). For his critics, Nora’s category of lieux de mémoire
becomes a roundabout means of reviving the traditional subjects and land-
marks of French national history against alternative histories (Anderson 2004).
Many commentators, from Quatremère de Quincy on, have seen museums
as unable to provide an authentic experience since they sever things from their
social context and their place in the world. For that kind of critique, museum
objects represent the past, but can never embody it or provide true access to it.
Oddly, Nora’s view of the task of the historian shares a similar frame of refer-
ence as that anti-museum discourse, though his conclusions are very different.
For him, the historian’s (and I suggest the museum’s) task of artificially resusci-
tating the living past is sufficient and to be celebrated. Their job is to bring the
past to life, compensating for the loss of an authentic collective memory by
creating a feeling of the immanence of the past in the present. However, other
writers have challenged the idea that the museum might act as compensation
for modernity. Instead they argue that it actually conspires in detaching the